GEAUX, Brian!

Honors College Alumnus and Former Goldwater Scholar Named 2011 Soros Fellow

Brian Goh and Dr. Drew Lamonica Arms, Director of Fellowship Advising

Brian Goh was in
class when he got the call.

“I didn’t
recognize the number, and I thought, ‘Maybe I should answer this,’” he said.

When stepped out
of class at Johns Hopkins to answer his phone, Goh learned that he had been
named a Paul and Daisy Soros Fellow, becoming only the second LSU graduate ever
to receive this prestigious award.

Comparable in
competitiveness to the Rhodes and Marshall Scholarships, each Soros Fellowship,
a two-year award, seeks to support the studies of the nation’s most exemplary
youth by providing tuition support and cash awards up to $50,000 toward any
degree-granting graduate program in the U.S.

“I was super
excited,” said Goh, whose research has focused on the gene evaluation and on
the use of stem cells in tissue engineering applications. “I never thought this
would happen as a kid. I mean, I
was eating dirt; I wasn’t looking forward to being successful.”

The Board of
Trustees of the Paul & Daisy Soros Fellowships for New Americans announced
the thirty 2011 Scholars Fellows — all either recent immigrants or the children
of immigrants — chosen for their extraordinary promise, diversity, drive, and
determination.

Goh said that the
Honors College has played a large role in his success by teaching him how to
think critically and by providing a well-rounded education.

“The Honors
College has given me so much,” he said. “College is less about knowledge and
more about learning how to think. Through the Honors College, I was able to take
classes outside of my major; it made me a more well rounded person.”

Goh said that his
small Honors classes and their group discussions taught him how to formulate an
argument and how to reason — skills which have helped him to succeed in medical
school.

“I had a lot of opportunities
here I really didn’t think were available other places for the same value,” he
said. “If you could really take advantage of those, you can do a lot.”

“I am not at all
surprised by his fantastic success, which began here when he was still an
Honors College student,” said Dr. Drew Lamonica Arms, Director of Fellowship
Advising. “He is a testament to that wonderful kind of student who embraces the
full experience — study abroad, research, service and fellowships.”

Dr. Arms said she
hopes Goh’s example will encourage more students to apply for prestigious
fellowships and make use of the resources available to them through the Honors
College Office of Fellowship Advising.

“I am so proud of
the path that he has blazed for Honors College students to come,” she
said.

The 24-year-old
Baton Rouge native was born to parents of Chinese extraction who immigrated to
the United States from Malaysia.

“I don’t consider
myself a new American, but I definitely think I’ve had a different [household]
environment than some,” he said. “I think the aim of the Soros was to highlight
sort of what might happen if immigration laws were more stringent or if we
didn’t allow people to immigrate here … it’s the American dream —you can make
yourself.”

The story of
Goh’s parents is an example of that dream. His father, who graduated with a
Ph.D. from LSU, was one of sixteen children and worked for years as a manual
laborer on a rubber plantation.

“I definitely
admire my parents a lot … they’ve worked so hard to get here, (and) I’ve been
very appreciative of the fact that they’ve been able to give me the
opportunities that they have. I get a lot of my drive from them,” said Goh.

Goh was awarded
the Soros Fellowship for his creativity, originality, initiative, and sustained
accomplishment — qualities which are easy to recognize in his four years at
LSU.

“I don’t think I
realized how much I loved it here until I moved away,” he said “LSU gave me the
ability to go to classes and meet really fun people, do research at Pennington,
and then to go to a football game on the weekends —I could do anything that I
wanted here. Looking back, it
worked out perfectly.”

While at LSU, Goh
received a Goldwater Scholarship, a Howard Hughes Institute research award, and
a spot on USA Today’s 2009 All-USA College Academic First Team.

He performed stem
cell and circadian biology research at Pennington Biomedical Research Center,
which resulted in eleven publications, including one of the Top 20 Articles in
2007 for Journal of Tissue Engineering and Regenerative Medicine.

In 2006, he founded Team
Detour Cycling and went on to participate in the Capital to Capital Ride,
pledging support for the Mary Bird Perkins Cancer Center with bicycle ride from
Washington, DC, to Baton Rouge to raise money for cancer screenings. The event including lobbying Congress
for medical research funding — and Goh and his team raised over $30,000.

And that’s just as an undergraduate.

After graduating
in 2009 with a degree in biochemistry and a perfect 4.00 GPA, Goh enrolled in
the M.D./Ph.D. program at the Johns Hopkins University, where he is currently
in his second year of medical training.

A self-described
“low-key guy,” it’s obvious that Goh doesn’t consider himself to be
exceptionally accomplished — in spite of his remarkable achievements.

“I’ve just kind
of worked hard at what I do,” he said “And I’ve always tried to balance work
and play, or integrate them. For instance, I really love to bike and to travel,
so raising money and biking halfway across the country was fun … It was an
adventure,” he said. “You can give back to your community and still do the things
you love.”

After finishing
medical school, Goh plans to undertake a residency and continue his research on bone tissue
regeneration.

“I want to be
able to create something in the lab and bring it to my patients,” he said.
“There’s a lot of discoveries that get made in the lab that never make it to
patient care. There’s something very dynamic about tissue engineering, creating
something that wasn’t there, something that could improve someone’s quality of
life — that’s been my motivation.”